WATCH: Rivers of raw sewage flowing into the rivers which provide your drinking water

Residents from the sleepy Vereeniging suburb of Peacehaven have struggled for the past five weeks to keep their heads above steadily rising raw sewage leaks spilling into streets and homes. 

The suburb has been the hotspot of raw sewage spills for years, but many residents say the current situation is the worst it has ever been. To make matters worse, this raw sewage flows directly into the Klip River, which links up with the Vaal River. 

According to Save the Vaal Environment (Save) vice-chairperson Maureen Stewart, part of the reason Peacehaven is drowning in sewage is due to a temporary pipe laid during a Gauteng housing development in October 2019.

Stewart explained that Rand Water was the implementing agent to create infrastructure to provide sanitation services to the development, and laid a temporary pipe to divert sewage flow into the Vaal River. The pipe remained in place when work was stopped, and the project is only likely to be completed in December. 

“This is an illegal and criminal act on the part of Rand Water as it is in direct contravention of the National Water Act … Save heard about this very recently.”

Rand Water spokesperson Justice Mohale said they are not aware of any temporary pipeline laid, and suggested getting comment from Emfuleni municipality. No response was received. 

Community leader Jakes Steenkamp took The Citizen on a tour of the town, and detailed his frustration with Emfuleni municipal officials and the Department of Water and Sanitation. He said that despite numerous attempts to contact authorities to rectify the sewage leaks and large-scale blockages, no action has been taken. 

A river of raw sewage has recently cropped up in the aisles of Westwalt Hof flats, with residents often living within a few hundred meters of untreated sewage. 

Aside from the stench and faeces littering the corridors, backyards are turning into septic swamps. Residents told The Citizen they no longer go outside, cannot eat vegetables they grow in their gardens, and have to wash their pets daily if they come into contact with sewage pools scattered across Westwalt. 

One family of four women said they take turns scooping water out of their toilet throughout the night, which regularly overflows with raw sewage. This is especially unbearable in the early evening when tenants return home from work and all cook, clean and bath simultaneously, they explained. 

They said they had not slept in five weeks, after waking up one morning to find their kitchen flooded with raw sewage. They described their current situation as a war, and are at their wits’ end. 

Another resident was forced to build a trench to divert sewage from pooling in his garden, and his neighbour explained that the situation is significantly worse in the summer, due to the abundance of flies and mosquitos. 

The roots of trees in her garden are rotting and the walls around her home crumbling due to sewage seeping into the soil. People in the area worry that the foundations of their homes could soon start to erode, and fear for the health hazards of living in such close proximity to raw sewage. 

Load shedding exacerbates sewage leaks 

Department of Water and Sanitation spokesperson Sputnik Ratau explained that load shedding has significantly impacted the running of raw sewage treatment plants. 

“Without electricity, sewage runs in the streets as pump stations and treatment plants cannot function without electricity.” He said the problem is exacerbated by the high level of electric cable theft in the Vaal region. 

He said that 25.2km of bulk lines in the Sebokeng Catchment have been cleared since lockdown ensued. In addition, 379 manholes in the Sebokeng Catchment have been cleaned, 46 manhole covers replaced, 14 manholes replaced during the unblocking of bulk lines in the Sebokeng Catchment, and almost 50 tons of rubble removed from bulk lines and reticulation network lines to date. 

Ratau said the flow of sewage into the Sebokeng and Rietspruit Wastewater Treatment Works has increased from 18ml per day to 120ml and from 19ml to 43ml per day respectively, thanks to pipelines being unblocked. 

However, the task of operating and improving existing water infrastructure is often up to local authorities, in this case, the Emfuleni local municipality (ELM). 

Emfuleni’s waste water treatment system is made up of three treatment plants, 44 pump stations and roughly 1,600m of pipe networks. But due to lack of infrastructure maintenance and investment needed to cater for the region’s rapidly expanding population, the system collapsed in 2017, explained Stewart. 

Despite interventions by the SANDF in November 2018 and the Ekurhuleni Water Care Company (Erwat) taking over in 2019, repair work to treatment plants and pump stations was still not done by June this year, when Erwat’s contract expired, Stewart said. 

The Sebokeng wastewater treatment plant has been working over capacity daily since it was vandalised in 2018, pushing the amount of treated wastewater to over 100 million litres. Stewart said work is expected to be commissioned at Sebokeng by the end of July. 

Large-scale governmental failure

This commitment is still not enough to guarantee that the DWS steps up to its responsibilities, according to water scientist Anthony Turton, who said overdue wastewater treatment work is due to nationwide State failure. 

“When a municipality or government department is unable to self-correct, then it has failed, and requires external intervention to reboot the system. With this as a departure, we must ask how money has been thrown at the problem over time, and what has the outcome been?” 

Turton said the DWS had failed “dismally” as a regulator and service provider, and criticised state-owned entities. 

“It speaks to the central issue with government insofar as SOE’s are vehicles for the distribution of patronage. The bigger the problem, the more money must be thrown at it, and the longer the problem is perpetuated, the greater the sum that can be used to pay patronage,” he explained. 

The pathway to failure was continued by the DWS abandoning Blue and Green Drop Reporting Systems, Turton said, estimating that the water sector needs at least R800 billion over the next decade “just to restore what has been broken.” 

“By allowing this failure to continue unabated, simply because DWS failed in its regulatory role, around two-thirds of all municipalities are now in various stages of failure and are unable to self-correct.” 60% of wastewater treatment works in the country are not fully functional, with processes further disrupted due to load shedding. 

He added that pinning hopes on Erwat to solve pollution problems is unwise, because “Erwat is a serial polluter from sewage works it manages on the Hennops River, so why would it be able to fix a problem elsewhere, when over decades it has been unable to fix its own problem on the Hennops?” 

Disease and permanent damage to the Vaal River

A potentially disastrous list of diseases are imminent due to people living in close proximity to raw, untreated sewage. These include E.coli, gastroenteritis, cryptosporidium,  Hepatitis A, Adenovirus G & F, and cholera, to name a few.

The latest E.coli results in the Vaal Barrage Reservoir issued by Rand Water show many sample points containing enough counts to cause skin irritations, infections and intestinal disorders if ingested. 

Turton said unproven work suggests that Covid-19 could be transmitted via faecal-oral pathways, which would mean untreated sewage poses an even more health risks. 

“Until disprove[d], the precautionary principle dictates that it must be regarded as a risk.” 

Another danger brought on by continued Vaal River pollution is blue-green algae, a primitive bacteria that is part plant, part animal, Turton explained. 

Two dominant species are found in South Africa, with Anabaena spp. producing a toxin called Microcystin-LR, whose active ingredient is Beta-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA). BMAA is released and becomes part of the water molecule when the organism becomes distressed.

“Because it is not separate from the water molecule, it cannot be filtered out by conventional systems currently used by all water treatment plants in SA. This means that the public is being exposed to low doses over a long period of time.” 

This has the potential to cause cancer, and can cause babies to be born with cognitive disorders. Neurological disorders are also associated with BMAA, Turton explained, adding that over 60% of South Africa’s dams are currently polluted with Cyanobacteria. 

“No system has ever been brought back to a stable but recovered state with our currently available science,” he warned. And if the Vaal becomes polluted with enough sewage and chemicals which trigger cyanobacterial blooms, Turton lamented that the process is irreversible. 

The systematic delay of dire maintenance and upgrades to the country’s water and sanitation infrastructure has contributed significantly to the current state of the Vaal River. The more sewage builds up, the more we risk water from the Vaal River becoming irreversibly polluted. 

This not only puts human, animal and plant lives at risk, but threatens the livelihoods of businesses, suburbs, and surrounding environments. An urgent, long-term call to action has been repeated by Save, who continues to fight for the Vaal River to be restored to its former glory.

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